Following a highly successful season of online productions, Original Theatre Company announces its first live stage production since March 2020, Ben Brown’s new political drama, A Splinter Of Ice, which will be filmed on stage at the Cheltenham Everyman Theatre and released online, before touring UK theatres early summer.
A Splinter Of Ice, will be filmed as a high quality, three-camera recording for online release on the company’s streaming platform, Original Theatre Online, from 15 April until 31 July 2021. Tour dates will be announced in due course. Directed by Alan Strachan with Alastair Whatley, the production will star Oliver Ford Davies as Graham Greene, Stephen Boxer as Kim Philby and Sara Crowe as Rufa Philby.
Moscow 1987 and the cold war begins to thaw. After declining his offer for more than 30 years, novelist Graham Greene travels into the heart of the Soviet Union to meet with his old MI6 boss, Kim Philby. Under the watchful eye of Kim’s Russian wife, Rufa, the two men set about catching up on old times. With a new world order breaking out around them, how much did the writer of The Third Man know about Philby’s secret life as a spy and did Philby betray his friend as well as his country?
From the writer and director of the award-winning West End play Three Days in May, which inspired the Oscar-winning film Darkest Hour, Ben Brown’s new political drama explores an unlikely friendship; a friendship interwoven with deceit and loyalty. Ben said of this production of A Splinter Of Ice, “I’m thrilled to be working again with Alan Strachan and Oliver Ford Davies and to be joining forces with Stephen Boxer, Sara Crowe and Alastair Whatley for the premiere, at last, of my new play, online prior to a national tour.”
Alastair Whatley, Artistic Director of Original Theatre Company, said, “I am thrilled that we are producing Ben’s fantastic new play with such a wonderful cast and creative team. The plan was to open this in front of audiences at the end of March, but alas, once again, plans have changed. Instead of cancelling, we will now film the production at the beautiful Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham, releasing the play to our audiences around the world, before then returning to stages across the UK as soon as theatres re-open.”
So far, in the last 10 months, Original has streamed to over 30,000 households with its productions of Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong Online, Louise Coulthard’s Watching Rosie, Torben Betts’s Apollo 13: The Dark Side of The Moon and Philip Franks’s The Haunting of Alice Bowles, as well as the filmed productions of Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art and Ali Milles’s The Croft. Original’s next online production will be the first revival of the Peter Barnes monologues, Barnes’ People, which will be available from 18 February.
